In looking at the German higher education response to the current refugee influx as a macrosocial challenge, we apply Connie Gersick’s Punctuated Equilibrium Paradigm34 and Susan Robertson and Roger Dale’s Critical Cultural Political Economy of Education (CCPEE) framework.35 We see both as helpful organizing principles.
We utilize the Robertson and Dale framework to organize our discussion, as their use of cultural, political, and eco- nomic lenses provides a helpful gestalt on which to structure our own discussion. We see the German higher education (HE) response to the 2015–16 “refugee crisis” as embodying larger globalizing processes and structures. Robertson and
Dale’s CCPEE framework insightfully helps to analyze the broader context that influences and conditions German HE policy and institutional responses to refugee integration and access to higher education. Their framework emphasizes the critical interrogation of what they call the “education ensemble” as it interacts with and emerges from the cultural, political, and economic processes that are embedded within globalization. The use of the concept of “education ensemble” does not simply reduce education to being an agent of social- ization or allow it to be merely measured through learning outcomes; it acknowledges that education is deeply embed- ded in often highly contested, multiple societal relationships through the very actors, institutions, and structures that operate within it.36 It is in this context that we analyze the way emerging and existing juxtapositions between cultural, political, and economic forces shaped the response, both broadly in Germany and also through the actions taken by its universities, as they prepared to accommodate this new group of incoming students.
In looking at the university sector and how cultural, polit- ical, and economic forces challenged the refugee integration programming they were beginning to organize at the time, we also find particular resonance in Gersick’s Punctuated Equilibrium Paradigm.37 This paradigm describes organiza- tions as characterized by “relatively long periods of stability (equilibrium), punctuated by compact periods of qualitative, metamorphic change (revolution).”38 This model provides an appropriate lens to look at the German university land- scape in its assumption that, along with continuous adap- tation efforts, major changes also suddenly occur at times. Ideally universities are responsive, but it may be in how they react that sheds the brightest light on their openness to reform and adaptation. This puncturing of otherwise general equilibrium in the German higher education system is what makes the case of the refugee influx into the country and its university sector so intriguing. Even though German uni- versities had been reforming incrementally during previous decades in response to the Bologna Declaration,39 the unex- pected influx of refugees in 2015–16 presented them with a new opportunity to more urgently consider targeted reforms.
The Study
The rush to cope with the regulatory demands of process- ing so many new arrivals allowed relatively little time to reflect on the effectiveness and impact of the process. Early on, accounts of the sudden influx of refugees and limited analysis came primarily from the media, German educa- tion and migration ministries, and a handful of policy and philanthropic organizations that were conducting primarily demographic studies. Mostly missing were more careful and deeper academic analyses on specific aspects of a critical
period in Germany’s recent history as it was unfolding in the early days of the influx in 2015–16.
Only more recently have publications in German-lan- guage academic journals40 and research reports by German ministries (e.g., Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung41) and university research groups (e.g., Kleist42) begun to examine the legal and practical boundaries that have faced refugees trying to access German higher education. Inter- national journals only more recently have begun to publish research on the German case, and theses and doctoral stud- ies have also begun to emerge (e.g., Ragab et al.43). Given the fact that the education sector is a critical player in refugee resettlement in offering a primary conduit back into society and acting as a powerful antidote to the trauma of forced migration,44 documenting this process is important, and understanding what happened early on in the German case is critical for historical and policy studies that are still to be written.
This article contributes to this important area of scholar- ship by detailing the situation in Germany and how various sectors and key players reacted in 2015–16. The German higher education system provides an ideal setting to study the refugee response and to look initially at the early suc- cess and failures of its universities to integrate this poten- tially significant new workforce. How the process played out early on, and will continue to evolve, will have significant short- and long-term ramifications in a country in which the immigrant influx has been discussed as a possible solution to the demographic challenges facing the country after decades of a declining birth rate and an aging population.45
The goal of this study was to investigate how German universities sought to help newly arrived refugees primarily from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, but also in lesser num- bers from Africa (e.g., Eritrea), Central and Eastern Europe, and other countries and regions, integrate into the German higher education system by creating academic program- ming and support services. We did this by looking primarily at how the migration dynamic in Germany played out in cultural, political, and economic terms as reported in the daily and weekly newspapers and magazines spanning the political spectrum, through grey literature published by higher federal authorities at the time, independently com- missioned research projects that had just been published, and individual academic researchers publishing in English and in German at the time. Since then much more research has begun to emerge, but our focus is on the earliest studies that came out in the initial crisis period.
In addition to the literature review, we also sent out an email survey in the autumn and winter of 2016 to a selection of seventeen universities46 throughout Germany (receiving fifteen responses) to query them about their current and
planned activities in the coming years. Our sample covered institutions in the former East and West and also those in larger metropolitan centres like Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich, and smaller cities like Dortmund and Darmstadt. The sample included responses from a range of adminis- trators at each university, from directors of international offices, to those leading smaller teams of personnel who were working directly with refugee students. Our email included an explanation of our interest in analyzing in detail how German universities were dealing with the “refugee crisis,” and also understanding how Germany was manag- ing the latest migration challenge at a time when the political moods in both Europe and the United States appeared to be increasingly isolationist and anti-migrant. Our questions asked respondents to explain the current number of refu- gees, requirements for enrolment, services and programs provided, and anticipated enrolments in coming years.
In seeking to triangulate our comprehensive literature review and survey of institutions, we also looked at smaller recent studies. For example, our research was inspired in particular by a smaller, previous study conducted by Hannes Schammann and Christin Younso,47 who had looked at the activities of seven universities in the winter semester between October 2015 and April 2016. We selected our universities on the following criteria: (1) geographic location representing diverse parts of the country, particularly the former East and West, (2) likelihood of having a large concentration of refu- gees, which encompasses both major metropolitan centres and smaller affected cities, and (3) level of engagement with refugees.
Our analysis of the fifteen universities was not intended as our sole data source but rather to further shed light on the “refugee crisis” as reported by the wide range of sources noted above. Finally, we also sought email feedback from the German Academic Exchange Service, which was facilitating educational integration of refugees in Germany’s sixteen federal states. We believe the DAAD’s response, along with the responses from our fifteen participating universities, helps to demonstrate the passion and dedication shown by the higher education sector at the time to addressing refugee integration challenges. Although the profiled universities represented only a small slice of Germany’s more than 400 institutions of higher education, these data, in combination with the DAAD information and our literature review, pro- vide a robust summary of the diverse range of universities and other key players who initiated services in 2015–16 to begin helping Germany’s newest arrivals.
Findings
From the research we found emerging fault lines in soci- ety as a reflection, or catalyst, of the “refugee crisis.” In the
following section we use the CCPEE framework as an organi- zational tool to structure our findings in the three over- arching categories (cultural, political, economic) with the corresponding subcategories (for example, for the category “cultural,” we discuss universities as a civil society player addressing the “refugee crisis”). We look at these fault lines within the cultural, political, and economic factors and how education has influenced these three fields at play, by look- ing specifically at higher education institutions and how they have interacted within the three dimensions.